


Time Will Bend To Me

by navaan



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dark Doctor (Doctor Who), Enemy Lovers, Ficlet, Implied/Referenced Canonical Suicide, M/M, Post-Episode AU: s04e16 The Waters of Mars, Time Lord Victorious, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 18:25:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17472662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: After Waters of Mars the Doctor takes time into his own hands.





	Time Will Bend To Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laire (laireshi)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laireshi/gifts).



It’s Mars that does it. 

The shot rings out and he knows that this human woman has set time straight again against his will - undoing what he’s done with one oe bullet.

There’s grief, but it’s pushed back and then feels nothing but anger. 

How dare she? Now that he has realised that nobody can hold him back, rein him in? He’s not a Time Lord. He’s the _only_ Time Lord now. He makes the rules.

The only Time Lord in existence. He remembers what that means. Why he’s the only one.

Anger, grief -- a pained cry as the Master takes the decision from his hands in the same way that Adelaide Brooke has just taken it from him.

The Master had died - refusing to generate senselessly. 

It’s what makes the Doctor’s decision. He’s the Time Lord Victorious. He doesn’t have to accept the unacceptable. Whatever Adelaide Brooke thought of it, he was going to win. Time was his now.

He strides back into the Tardis and she hums with a frightening howl. She knows. She’s been waiting. 

As always they are in it together.

* * *

The Master wakes up on the floor of the Tardis and around them time is shivering and groaning. 

“Steady,” the Doctor says, but he’s talking to the Tardis.

The howling of time’s louder than the drums in his mind as it tries to swallow them, straighten and curl and correct. 

“No!” the Doctor says and the howling stops, the Tardis hums.

The Master’s lying in his own blood, a gunshot wound courtesy of his lovely wife about to kill him, but he has no recollection how he got here. There’s a plan. An important plan to hurt that other Time Lord there that involves dying and...

“Doctor?” he groans. 

“You’re regenerating,” the Doctor says with icy steel, the hint of drums sounding through time. He recognizes the beat. The eyes are what fill him in. The Doctor’s from the future, just a little jump up ahead.

“What have you done?” he asks when he understands the magnitude of what must have happened. It was fixed. There was no way to go back into that year without.”

“Without the willingness to break all rules? Make another abomination?”

The Tardis hums satisfied. 

This isn’t the weeping Doctor he remembers. 

The wound pains him, he feels the tendrils of regeneration energy swirl in him. Regeneration grips him. “Finally,” he says, “you can hear them too.”

“No,” the Doctor says and his grin’s the terrifying depth of black hole, “I control them, you drums. You and me, we make the rules now.”

The Doctor holds out a hand and helps him stand; the regenerative energy reaches for him as the Master accepts the help.

There’s no need to die. This changed Doctor’s with him. Finally they agree that old rules have no bearing on them any longer.

He laughs together with his old-new friends and this time decides to live.


End file.
